The Carddeck and a Strain Wave Clock
Completing projects is tricky for me - I am very good at starting them, but my motivation tends to dwindle about the time that the tricky part of the problem has been solved. The final polish has no sheen for me, which resigns actually posting about them to the scrapheap of procrastination.
I spent a lot of the past month noodling on a design for a clock that uses a strain-wave (harmonic drive) gearbox to step down the gear ratio needed for the hands. Conceptually it was a tricky problem, and I found gear ratios that would indeed work in theory, but in practise, overcoming the friction and binding of the stages meant that the clock didn't run for long before jamming.
Eventually my patience for the project ran out - it's a fun idea, and perhaps I'll return to it, but I didn't have the motivation to get it to the finish line.
In contrast, another little project, was so short that I managed to get it done in an evening, and therefore kept a little of the momentum running long enough to be motivated to write this post.
This is the carddeck - a tiny computer built around the M5Stack Cardputer. I added a secondary screen, and vibe coded a little operating system for it. It's pretty fun and useless. The 3D printed case was really thrown together and only iterated on until it mostly worked, very little perfectionism needed.
I don't imagine many people will be interested in building these exact devices, but for the curious, the CAD files are on onshape:
The electronics are simple enough that I don't think they warrant sharing, and the software on the computer is total vibe slop. It's amazing you can get a running "OS" with just a little prompting.